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Thelonious Monk

News about Thelonious Monk, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Thelonious Monk, the pianist and composer, created wry, angular melodies and unusual harmonic progressions that are among the most striking contributions to the jazz repertory. Although Mr. Monk's music was rooted in the stride-piano tradition of Willie (The Lion) Smith, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington, it stood apart from the main flow of jazz.

"He hasn't invented a new scheme of things," Paul Bacon wrote in the jazz magazine The Record Changer in 1948, "but he has, for years, looked with an unjaundiced eye at music and seen a little something else. He plays riffs that are older than Bunk Johnson but they don't sound the same. His beat is familiar but he does something strange there, too. He can make a rhythm almost separate, so that what he does is inside or outside it. Monk is really making use of all the unused space around jazz, and he makes you feel that there are plenty of unopened doors."

Randy Weston, a pianist who studied with Mr. Monk, has called him "as complete an original as it is possible to be" and he cites the unifying "simplicity" in his music. "Not that his music isn't often complex to execute," Mr. Weston explained, "but it always comes through so clear and accurate, so uncluttered. His music is simple in the sense that it has totality of personality. It's all him."

Among his works were "Round Midnight," "Straight No Chaser" and "Well, You Needn't." The strange contours of Mr. Monk's tunes led the jazz critic Whitney Balliett to describe them as rippling "with dissonances and rhythms that often give one the sensation of missing the bottom step in the dark."

"Jazz," Mr. Monk once said, "is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figurations, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently." John S. Wilson